Frontier Town

It was with renewed anticipation that we headed out of Saigon on our 6 hour bus journey to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

The bus company provided assistants on board who managed all the immigration paperwork and this proved to be a blessing as the whole process seemed a bit chaotic. After clearing Vietnamese immigration we entered a 200 metre stretch of a no-man's land up to the Cambodian border control point which beckoned. All the passports were taken from us and we were shuttled off to a restaurant while all the formalities were seen to by our helpful on-board assistants. The drive to the restaurant was a bit of a shocker... we had heard stories that parts of Cambodia were a bit like the Wild West and the border town seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Dusty streets, ramshackle buildings and some scruffy looking kids. there were even 'saloons' - well, Casinos actually and lots of them. These casinos are operated by Thais and attract Vietnamese gamblers. They all looked a bit dodgy to me and were probably money laundering for all types of unsavoury characters across SE Asia.

The roadside restaurant we stopped at made my heart sink. If the rest of Cambodia was like this, I was going to want to go back to Vietnam! Our fellow Vietnamese and Cambodian travellers jumped at the chance to have lunch while the rest of passengers (hungry) milled around wondering whether to risk the food that was piled up at the kitchen and that was piled up with flies. A rudimentary fly catcher in the kitchen helped me make up my mind to stay hungry for a while - it was a wooden board painted with some sticky substance and it was covered in hundreds of little fly corpses. I made do with a can of Coke and got back on the bus and wanted to get away as soon as possible.

Not exactly a great first impression of Cambodia but thankfully this was to prove to be superseded by many very positive impressions and experiences in the next 2 weeks!